Juvenile Macomb County killers to get new sentences

The local court process will begin Wednesday for the resentencing of two men convicted of abducting and murdering a 21-year-old Chesterfield Township man in Detroit.
Attorneys representing Ihab Maslamani, Robert Taylor and Macomb prosecutors are expected to appear in front of Judge Diane Druzinski in Macomb County Circuit Court to schedule evidentiary hearings for the second sentencings in the 2009 murder of Matthew Landry.
The legal development was expected following the June 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared automatic life-without-parole sentences for defendants under 18 are unconstitutional. The court says automatically sentencing juveniles the same as adults is cruel and unusual punishment.
Chief Homicide Attorney William Cataldo will have to convince the judge the defendants’ current sentences should stick.
“The burden is on the prosecutor to show that the defendants should be sentenced to mandatory life in prison without parole, on a probable-cause basis,” Cataldo said.
The defendants are not expected to appear in court Wednesday.
Maslamani, now 22, was 17 at the time of the murder while Taylor, now 20, was 16 at the time.
Following evidentiary hearings, Judge Druzinski will have the option to lower the sentence to life in prison with a chance of parole to be determined by the Michigan Department of Corrections.
However, Druzinski could have a third option because the Michigan Supreme Court will rule on whether a judge could set a minimum term, according to attorney Deborah Labelle of the juvenile lifer law project for the Detroit American Civil Liberties Union.
The proceedings are the first for approximately a dozen such cases in Macomb County, and 350 in Michigan, if the state high court rules the U.S. high court’s ruling is retroactive, although U.S. District Judge Corbett O’Meara in January sided with retroactivity by ruling all the defendants should be eligible for an MDOC parole hearing, Labelle said.
Statewide, three defendants convicted as juveniles in Oakland, Genesee and St. Clair counties have been resentenced, according to Labelle. Two defendants’ life-without-parole terms were upheld while one defendant’s sentence was lowered to “parolable” life, she said.
Maslamani and Taylor’s convictions were upheld by the state appeals court, but resentencings were ordered based on the U.S. Supreme Court decision.
The cases were set for scheduling in the Mount Clemens courthouse after the state Supreme Court rejected their applications to appeal the COA’s rulings, said Maslamani’s attorney, Valerie Newman.
Taylor’s attorney, Jonathan Simon, could not be reached for comment.
When the U.S. high court ruled, it produced criticism from crime victims’ rights organizations, which said that reviving the cases will force victims’ loved ones to relive the awful emotions of the case.
Landry’s family and friends devotedly attended the proceedings, and Landry’s mother, Doreen, testified at both defendants’ trials and sentencings.
The hearings likely will include witnesses -- potentially family members of both Landry and the defendants, psychological experts and statisticians, according to Cataldo.
“We’ll take our time to review what is done in these types of cases,” he said.
Matthew Landry, a Roseville native, was missing for four days before his body was found Aug. 13, 2009, in an abandoned home near Seven Mile and Hayes roads in Detroit. He had been abducted four days earlier outside a Quiznos sandwich shop at 10 Mile Road and Gratiot Avenue in Eastpointe after buying sandwiches for himself and his Roseville girlfriend.
Prosecutors say he was shot execution-style that night once in the head.
The day after Landry’s abduction, Maslamani terrorized patrons and employees while robbing a Harrison Township bank and a customer. Two days after the murder, he was captured by police during a carjacking at 12 Mile Road and Gratiot in Roseville.
He later became a suspect in the murder.